multi-threaded R current status?
-----Original Message----- From: Duncan Temple Lang [mailto:duncan@research.bell-labs.com] Sent: Friday, April 12, 2002 3:26 PM To: Warnes, Gregory R Cc: 'R-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch' Subject: Re: [Rd] multi-threaded R current status? I plan to attack this in mid May unless Luke or others get there first. As I have mentioned before, making the R engine reentrant and/or thread-safe will probably not be all that is needed for your purposes, and fixing the packages, especially those with native (C, C++ & Fortran) code is also necessary. That is why I have been working on a tool that aids in the task of removing the global variables.
Thanks for the status report. I'm a firm believer in creating tools to automate pesky repetitive tasks. Once the core of R is reentrant/thread-safe, perhaps it would be possible to get 90% of the way to fully reentrant/thread-safe by modifying .C / .Fortran / friends to include a lock that prevent more than one thread at a time from accessing functions within the same library (unless, of course, the library is flagged as thread-safe.)
Also, it may be prudent to prioritize an adequate security model in your application over allowing concurrent intrusions :-)
Yes, I've already been thinking about security. For the moment, I'm building this tool strictly for trusted environments where security shouldn't be a problem, and I'm not directly exposing R commands to the end user. Still, I'm already running the server as 'nobody' to lessen the potential for trouble, and I've been considering how to run this within a chroot jail which contains only the necessary files to run R. R has a *lot* of features that allow access to the underlying system and that could potentially be used to do nasty things, particularly if the user is allowed to provide arbitrary R code. Of course, so do all of our favorite CGI languages. That's part of what makes them useful ;^) -Greg
D. Warnes, Gregory R wrote:
Hi All, What is the current status of removing the global variables
etc that is
required to permit multi-threading R? I'm developing a web application tool for/using R, python
(www.python.org),
and Zope (www.zope.org), and it would be really convenient
if I could use
something like RPy to communicate with several concurrent R
sessions,
preferably within the same process space. -Greg
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